THESAURUS: Contrastive Graph Clustering by Swapping Fused Gromov-Wasserstein Couplings

作者：Bowen Deng, Tong Wang, Lele Fu, Sheng Huang, Chuan Chen, Tao Zhang · 发表于：Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1609/aaai.v39i15.33779 · 被引用次数：5 · 研究领域：Topological and Geometric Data Analysis、Advanced Graph Neural Networks、Complex Network Analysis Techniques

Graph node clustering is a fundamental unsupervised task. Existing methods typically train an encoder through self-supervised learning and then apply K-means to the encoder output. Some methods use this clustering result directly as the final assignment, while others initialize centroids based on this initial clustering and then finetune both the encoder and these learnable centroids. However, due to their reliance on K-means, these methods inherit its drawbacks when the cluster separability of encoder output is low, facing challenges from the Uniform Effect and Cluster Assimilation. We summarize three reasons for the low cluster separability in existing methods: (1) lack of contextual information prevents discrimination between similar nodes from different clusters; (2) training tasks are not sufficiently aligned with the downstream clustering task; (3) the cluster information in the graph structure is not appropriately exploited. To address these issues, we propose conTrastive grapH clustEring by SwApping fUsed gRomov-wasserstein coUplingS (THESAURUS). Our method introduces semantic prototypes to provide contextual information, and employs a cross-view assignment prediction pretext task that aligns well with the downstream clustering task. Additionally, it utilizes Gromov-Wasserstein Optimal Transport (GW-OT) along with the proposed prototype graph to thoroughly exploit cluster information in the graph structure. To adapt to diverse real-world data, THESAURUS updates the pr...